'For me," Helmut Schön said of Franz Beckenbauer in February 1965 after calling him up to the West Germany team for the first time, "he is the player of the future. Maybe not in midfield, perhaps up front."
People were always looking at Beckenbauer and seeing in him a being from another age, and that meant that, for a long time, nobody really knew what to make of him. He was handsome, charismatic and languid, a player of effortless elegance guaranteed to enrage those who believed the game was about industry, sweat and graft. He was technically gifted. He saw things others didn't. He had grace and intelligence.
From his teens it was obvious Beckenbauer would be a player of the highest level. But in what position? Nobody could work it out. And so he effectively invented a role for himself. Beckenbauer is now considered the great example of the libero, but he was not a libero in the Italian sense, sitting behind a tough-man marker and initiating attacks with long-range passes. As he himself said, if he resembled anybody in Helenio Herrera's great Internazionale side that popularised the idea of a libero by winning two European Cups with their catenaccio, it was the left-back Giacinto Facchetti, a fine defender who would surge forward to create angles in midfield and join the attack.
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